Environment

June 12, 2013

Toronto City Council voted recently to spend upwards of eleven million dollars on traffic light synchronization in the city.

Wait a minute...

When I went to university - yes, there were cars then - we ('we' because we carpooled, dontcha know...) knew instantly when the traffic light computer was down because it took way longer to get to U of T from the Bathurst-Lawrence area where I and my fellow carpoolers lived.

I also once met the computer salesperson who had just had his territory changed so he missed out on the huge commission from the sale of new traffic computer equipment to the city.

So, we had traffic light synchronization computers way back then.

What happened??

OK, so Toronto grew a little.

I guess they failed to upgrade the system to keep pace with that growth.

One councillor, Josh Matlow, noted that the growth itself is in fact directly affecting traffic patterns - while all those new condos (which we seem to need so desperately despite reports that 70% of the ones we have are empty) are being built, you'll often see one or more lanes of allegedly public roadway closed off to enable the construction vehicles, concrete and gravel trucks, etc., easier access to the site, helping fatten the very private purses of the builders.

I'm sure we all have our favourite bad intersections which should be addressed first: me, I'd vote for Leslie and York Mills and Bayview and Sheppard among the worst I encounter regularly.

Of course, if Toronto would simply follow the lead of more advanced cities - i.e., just about every city in the world except in North America, although Waterloo is not far away - and convert as many of our intersections to roundabouts as soon as possible, we wouldn't even need traffic lights, let alone traffic light synchronization.

June 06, 2013

Apparently, I misunderstood the press release from General Motors about remote starters becoming standard equipment on 2014 vehicles.

The headline on the press release read, and I quote - well, I can do better than quote, I can cut-and-paste:

GM to Make Door Unlock, Remote Start Standard

You wouldn't think those words left much room for misunderstanding.

And yes, I did read the entire release!

But it turns out remote start will not necessarily be standard.

What will become standard for vehicles that DO have remote start is an app called RemoteLink, which will allow you to operate door locks, lights, horn and that disgraceful remote start function from your smart phone.

Also, it will continue to be operative even if the customer does not choose to renew his subscription to OnStar.

The press release also states, "Remote start is the most popular remote service by current users of the RemoteLink Mobile App."

Which is the saddest news I've heard today, and is the reason for the title of this blog post.

The fact that GM is making it even easier for wusses to use remote start is almost as bad as making it standard.

Because nothing changes the fact that remote starters are an offence against nature, and should be banned.

June 05, 2013

We're on Day Two of the AJAC EcoRun, designed to illustrate to Canadians the terrific advances in fuel-saving technology that the industry is making available, and to show that you can improve your own fuel consumption no matter what vehicle you're driving, by adopting a lighter-foot approach, and applying a bit more common sense to your driving style.

One of the most important things you can do to save fuel of course is - not idle.

By definition, you're using infinite litres of fuel per 100 km - getting zero miles per gallon - if your engine is running and you're not going anywhere.

And no, it does NOT take more fuel to re-start your engine than to keep it running. A study done many years ago for big trucks showed that shutting the engine off and re-starting it 30 times a minute - i.e., about as fast as you can do it - still uses less fuel than idling it for that minute.

The 'Eco' driving course we all took prior to doing this EcoRun said that if it looks like you'll be idling for more than 30 seconds, you should shut your engine off.

I think it should be an even shorter time than that, but 30 seconds at most...

Some jurisdictions - including Toronto - have an anti-idling by-law, although it seems more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

Idling is stupid, but idling when the engine is cold is even stupider. In fact, it's the worst possible thing you can do for your car's engine, short of sabotage.

The raw gasoline can wash the lubricating oil off cylinder walls, leading to premature wear.

And the engine also operates more efficiently when warm, and it warms up faster when under load - i.e., when you're driving.

As soon as the engine runs smoothly after a cold start - 10 -15 seconds tops - you should get rolling.

So while we are here spreading this Save The Trees gospel to the masses, what does General Motors do?

Announces that remote starters will become standard equipment on all their 2014 vehicles that are OnStar-equipped - which I think is almost all of them.

The Remote
Start nonsense is part of a package of remote services available through
a 'RemoteLink Mobile' app, which includes remote unlocking and
horn/lights activation via a smart phone.

Lights, horn and unlocking, maybe.

Remote start?

Don't even think about it.

Geez GM, not only does your timing suck with respect to announcing this during EcoRun, but the whole idea sucks.

Warming up a car interior with an inefficent gasoline engine is the worst possible thing you can do - for your car, for your wallet, for the environment.

I know people who have these damned things - and leave their cars running for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, while they drink their morning coffee - love them.

But come on - car companies go to all this trouble and expense to make their cars more fuel-efficient, then they pander to these wusses whose tushes are too tender to sit on a cold seat cushion for two minutes?

We all suffer the resultant higher car prices because of the added fuel saving technologies that governments are mandating, and these people are throwing this fuel away because they're too cheap to buy a pair of gloves?

At least the car companies should be forced to put a warning sticker on the sun visor saying, "Using Your Remote Starter Today Will Kill A Tree Tomorrow", or words to that effect. I'd be happy to help with the wording.

Your car has a cup holder - use it, and take your coffee with you.

And if it has a remote starter, please, if you care at all for your environment, do NOT use it.

June 04, 2013

It is the second (now-we-can-call-it-annual) Eco Run, presented by the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada.

A covey of 23 journalists from across the country have assembled to drive a covey of vehicles which represent the industry's best examples of fuel-saving technology from our Nation's Capital to Montreal.

It's not just electrics and hybrids either, although they are well-represented here.

But neither type of vehicle has found much favour amongst Canadians - well, amongst anybody, really. Gasoline is just not expensive enough to make them worth the up-front cost, the fuss, the bother, and the unknown down-the-road reliability, repair and recyclng issues.

Besides, the strides made by gasoline-engine manufacturers are, as I have said before, the real technology story of this decade.

One of my mounts today - the Mazda6, a mid-size sedan with the company's so-called 'SkyActiv' technology which includes a direct injection gasoline engine - recorded a very impressive 5.6 litres per 100 km on a mostly-highway trip from downtown Ottawa to Chateau Montebello across the river in Quebec.

OK, so I was hardly lead-footing it as I - um - have been known to do on occasion.

Because the other goal of this event is to illustrate that by driving smart and carefully, you can save a boatload of fuel.

In last year's run, every single car was able at one point at least to meet or exceed its Transport Canada fuel economy numbers.

Accelerate gently, anticipate traffic slowdowns, coast down when possible, eliminate idling, keep your speed down - all common sense techniques, except that they aren't very common.

It was hardly scientific, but I also tried a few times to switch on the Air Conditioning while on a flat stretch of highway to see how that impacted the fuel economy. The 'delta' varied, but typically the 'instant' fuel consumption shown on the car's dashboard rose about 1.5 litres per 100 km. For example, 3.9 to 5.4.

Add that up over a long trip, and what price comfort?

One thing you can do on a really hot day is run the A/C for a few moments to cool the car down, then shut it off again.

My favourite moments on these events always involve how we keep the electric cars charged en route - by plugging them into a Diesel-powered generator.

In this shot, taken on the roof of the parking garage of the Chateau Laurier hotel in Ottawa, you can see the generator amping up a Smart electric car.

There's a Ford Fusion electric hiding in behind the Smart.

The Chevrolet Volt plug-in 'extended range' electric had just pulled out from in front of the Smart.

Incidentally, that generator is towed from venue to venue by a big ol' gasoline-engined pick-up truck.

Doubling the irony, the electrics were all the while blocking the gasoline cars from leaving - the white sedan to the left of the Smart is my Mazda6.

May 27, 2013

Lot of talk going on these days about toll roads, especially putting a toll on the High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV, or 'Car Pool') lanes.

I'd say, "DGMS" - Don't Get Me Started.

But if I didn't get 'started' now and then, what's the point of having a blog?

To consider whether it's a good idea to have a toll on HOV lanes, shouldn't you first consider whether it's a good idea to have HOV lanes at all?

As I have expressed before, the evidence is clear:

NO.

If the purpose of an HOV lane is to encourage car pooling - and is that NOT the purpose? - then the fact that they are used infreqently now suggests they are a miserable failure.

Is the idea that by car pooling we save fuel and reduce congestion? When I cannot run in the HOV lane in my little Jetta Diesel wagon by myself but some dude and his buddy in a 4,000 kg Hemi doolie pickup that is twice as big, twice as heavy, and uses three times as much fuel can?

That's just nuts.

My and your taxes already paid for the building of those lanes. Why
shouldn't we be able to use them whenever we want?

One of these days, perhaps when all the Spider Solitaire games have been played and I DO have spare time on my hands, I'm gonna find a bridge over an HOV lane and count how many people are in fact using them legally, i.e., with the required minimum number of people in the vehicle.

Anecdotally, I'd guess maybe half.

So all that putting a toll on them would do is turn it from being illegal to putting a tax on another sin.

I guess it works for cigarettes and liquor.

Would a toll on HOV lanes encourage people to use them more, hence ease traffic congestion?

You can hardly get people to use them now for free; how are you going to charge people to use them?

OK, so maybe if you could legally use them by yourself it might increase utilization a little, even if it cost a couple bucks a day. So, essentially one system for the rich, another for the poor.

But if you just made the lanes available to everyone for free - everyone, as I pointed out, who has already paid to build them - wouldn't that be an even better use of our road resources? It would make better utilization of the investments we have already made in road infrastructure.

If they put tolls on HOV lanes, how are they going to collect the money? Issue permits?

How are they going to do that? How much would that additional bureaucracy cost?

How are they going to enforce it? There's scant evidence they enforce the restrictions now.

Or is every HOV lane going to become like Highway 407, privately run and tolled via transponder?

I doubt it. Who could/would afford the up-front capital costs?

HOV lanes are a stupid idea that is made stupider by putting a toll on them.

Now, IF the point of all these restrictions on our commuting is to reduce car use and encourage public transit, well, that's a non-starter because the bus/street car/light rail/commuter train 'public transit' systems we do have in the GTA are already over-crowded, yet don't service enough citizens to be worth it for countless others.

To expand that capacity, our municipal politicians would have to agree on - well, let's not get into that. You can read about those folks in the front of the paper...

Besides, we have a public transit system - it's called the roads!

If you want to encourage more efficient use of the road system, encourage people to take other forms of public transit, or better still encourage them to buy smaller, more fuel-efficient cars which would reduce pollution and fossil fuel consumption - who knows, maybe even make hybrids and electric cars financially feasible - there's only one way.

April 08, 2013

We actually drove Mimi - Lady Leadfoot's Mazda Miata - top-down for the first time this year today.

Heater on, and one window down - for some reason, that seems to generate less turbulence than both windows either up or down - and aside from the hair getting quite a work-out, it was very pleasant.

We don't drive her in winter unless there's an emergency. We keep her outside, under a cover, with a trickle charger on the battery. She never fails to fire right up.

If there were some sort of award for the car that best discharges its responsibilities, best fulfils its brief, does exactly what it is supposed to do - do you understand what I'm driving at here? - then the Mazda Miata would surely win in a walk.

More accurately, it would win in a lovely drive through the countryside.

In a nutshell, it was supposed to be a two-seat British sports car that didn't break and didn't leak oil all over your driveway.

That was pretty much what Mark Jordan, a designer for Mazda North America, and Bob Hall, previously and subsequently a car journalist but then a product planner for Mazda, had in mind when they conceived the car on a cocktail napkin in a bar in Irvine California back in the 1980s; in profile, the original Miata looked more like the 1964 Lotus Elan than the Lotus Elan did.

Despite considerable upgrading and improving over the intervening decades, that's pretty much what the Miata still is today.

I.e., damn-near perfect.

Oh yeah, the company can try to call it 'MX-5' if they want, because the marketing people say that's how it is marketed in other countries.

Marketing people can be such idiots; like anybody over here gives a damn what they do over there.

It was originally sold in Japan as the 'Eunos Roadster'. Does that mean we should have called it 'Eunos Roadster' too?

Um, I don't think so.

The Miata Owners Club is still (I think...) the largest one-marque car club in the world, testimony to the affection people have for this car. Lady Leadfoot and I aren't 'joiners' per se, but might be talked into going on some of their cruises this summer.

We understand that the next-gen Miata will be a joint venture with Fiat through its Alfa Romeo brand. That company has no shortage of sports car heritage, although dead-nuts reliability like Miata enjoys has never even been hinted at chez Alfa.

Can the joint venture pull off a car that's as spectacular as Mazda was able to do on its own with Miata?

April 01, 2013

Every major manufacturer of full-size pick-up trucks is going on and on about improved fuel efficiency.

Ford has their 'Eco-Boost' Direct Injection turbocharged V6 engine, claimed to offer the performance of an eight with the economy of a six.

Chevrolet advertises the most fuel-efficient V-8 in the class.

Ram (yclept 'Dodge') boasts 36 miles per gallon on the highway. (Er folks, Canada switched to Metric about four hundred years ago - isn't it time you caught up?...)

But is this something their customers give a flyin' wahoo about?

I guess if you're a business owner and your trucks are racking up thousands of klicks a month, fuel costs are a Big Deal.

So how come when I'm on the highway, all the pick-ups I see seem to be going a buck-forty?

And in town, the "That Thang Got a HEMI?" dude is rocketing away from the stoplight, seemingly trying to spin all four wheels at once?

I think the only reason truck makers are doing this is that in the States, Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for trucks are getting tougher and tougher to meet. So the manufacturers have to build more fuel-efficient trucks whether their customers care or not.

The trick then is to get the customers to buy them.

In reality, it's the same reason they build hybrid cars; if they can force-feed enough of those down buyers' throats, then they can sell some of the less-efficient cars that the customers actually want.

Of course none of this would be necessary if the US government would only act logically and raise the price of fuel to something even approximating the world level. Then the market could decide how it wanted to spend its money, on efficient cars, or on fuel.

But asking any government - especially these days, the US government - to act logically?

February 16, 2013

Driving home from the Auto Show this afternoon/evening - yes, it took that long - the Gardiner was closed completely, and the 401 was 20 km/h from Yonge right through to Highway 10.

I only actually saw one collision on the westbound 401, near the on-going construction between 427 and Dixie. It appeared to already be moved off onto the left shoulder of the Collectors (I was in the Express).

It didn't look too bad, maybe two cars by the time I got there, with tow trucks and at least one fire engine already on the scene.

But that didn't seem to be what was slowing people down.

We just can't drive in snow.

You can tell the people who have proper winter tires.

Not only because they usually have them mounted on black steel rims so as to protect their nice shiny alloys from the rigours of winter driving.

But because they can keep moving.

Yes, there were still a few people without their proper headlights on.

But the one thing I noticed moreso than ever today, and of course it hearkens back to my longest-standing pet peeve - people driving slowly in the left lane.

Folks, it's the old heat-kitchen thing - if you can't handle the pace, get the hell out of the way, and let those of us who have proper tires (and know how to drive) get home in time for dinner...